Missed calls: what share go unanswered and what happens to them

The answer depends on the industry and the study, but the range is consistent: a large minority of calls to small businesses are never picked up by a person.

Service Direct's 2019 call performance report reviewed a random sample of 1,000 recorded calls to 94 U.S. home service businesses across 42 categories. Business owners estimated they answered 97 percent of their calls. The recordings showed in-house staff answered 66 percent. Businesses using a third-party answering service answered 99 percent.

Law firms show the same pattern. In Clio's 2024 Legal Trends Report, a third-party firm posed as potential clients and contacted 500 U.S. law firms. Only 40 percent picked up when called, down from 56 percent in Clio's 2019 study. Shoppers reached just 52 percent of firms by phone at all, even after leaving messages, which means 48 percent were effectively unreachable.

Earlier research on the smallest businesses points the same way. Moneypenny reported in 2016 that an independent survey it commissioned of 300 micro businesses (0 to 9 employees) found a third of them failed to answer incoming calls.

The main reason is that the people who answer the phone are also doing the work. In a team of a few people, the person at the front desk is checking someone in, the owner is with a client, and nobody is free when the phone rings.

Timing is the second reason. Customers do not limit calls to business hours. In a September 2025 survey of 1,011 Americans published by Zenoti, 81 percent of salon and spa regulars said they call to manage appointments outside normal hours at least sometimes, and 50 percent said they regularly need after-hours support.

The third reason is that owners underestimate the problem. The Service Direct gap between a 97 percent estimate and a 66 percent measured answer rate shows how easy it is to miss what is not being tracked.

Most do not. Moneypenny's 2016 review of call data from 10,000 businesses found 69 percent of callers who reached voicemail did not leave a message.

When messages are left, they are not always returned. In Clio's 2019 study of 1,000 law firms, 39 percent of calls went to voicemail, and more than half of firms did not respond to those voicemails within 72 hours.

A voicemail greeting is not a plan for handling missed calls. It records the few callers who are patient enough to wait, and it does nothing for the rest.

Many move on to the next option. Clio's 2024 study did not measure what each caller did next, but it found the experience shaped the outcome: callers who spoke with someone at the firm were nearly eight times more likely to recommend the firm than callers who only received a voicemail follow-up.

Callers who are put on hold behave the same way. Invoca's 2021 Buyer Experience Benchmark Report, based on 500 U.S. consumers who had recently made a high-stakes purchase, found three out of four consumers will hang up after being placed on hold. Zenoti's 2024 survey of spa customers found 52 percent will hang up or give up after three minutes on hold.

Difficulty reaching a business also stops bookings outright. In Zenoti's 2025 survey, 71 percent of salon and spa regulars said they had skipped booking because it was too hard to get through to someone or book online.

Calling back is harder than it used to be. A Pew Research Center survey of 10,211 U.S. adults, conducted in July 2020, found 80 percent generally do not answer cellphone calls from unknown numbers. Sixty-seven percent said they do not answer but check any voicemail left, and 14 percent said they ignore the voicemail as well.

That has two effects. A return call from an unfamiliar number may not be picked up, and the voicemail left in reply needs to be clear about who is calling and why. A text message sent right after a missed call, from the same number the customer dialed, avoids part of this problem because the customer can see it and reply when convenient.

Start by measuring. Most business phone systems and call tracking tools report total calls, answered calls, missed calls and voicemails. Pull four weeks of data and look at three numbers: the share of calls answered live, the share of missed calls that received a callback, and the average time to that callback.

Then look at when calls are missed. Missed calls often cluster around opening time, lunch, the end of the day and after hours. Those clusters show where coverage is thinnest.

• Live answer rate: answered calls divided by total calls
• Callback rate: missed calls that received a callback or text
• Time to callback: minutes from the missed call to first contact
• Missed calls by hour and day of week
• Missed calls from new numbers versus existing customers

The options fall into a few groups. Each can be used alone or combined.

• Overflow routing: send unanswered calls to a second person or line after a set number of rings
• Automatic text back: send a text to the caller within a minute of a missed call
• Answering service or AI receptionist: answer every call, capture details and book where possible
• Online booking link: give callers a way to book without waiting for a callback
• Callback queue: a shared list of missed calls with an owner and a deadline for each